A nuanced coming-of-age tale wrapped around a tense, slow-burn mystery.
In this novel, an Australian woman confronts family traumas and long-buried secrets when she returns to her childhood home.
As a teen in Pine Creek, Australia, Sara Hamilton faces a difficult home life on her family’s cattle and sheep farm. Her father, Len, regularly berates 15-year-old Sara; her older siblings, Anne and Robbie; and their mother, Elena. The Hamilton teens try different methods of escape: Anne dreams of attending a university; Robbie starts using drugs and skipping school; and Sara develops a crush on Ryan Finch, a 17-year-old boy who works on Len’s farm. In June 1989, Sara’s 14-year-old neighbor Alec Stynes disappears from his home. Sara had wanted to befriend Alec, but her classmates said he was gay and she knew her father was homophobic. The next morning, Alec’s body is discovered in a channel near the highway. The authorities believe he was hit by a car, but the only clues are a missing shoe and a colorful coat he always wore. Ten years later, Sara’s mother asks her to return home after Len suffers a stroke. The protagonist’s homecoming coincides with the news that an ABC reporter is investigating Alec’s unsolved death (“They want to feature his death on a cold case program”). As Sara revisits her past and the circumstances surrounding the teen’s death, suspicions about the people closest to her surface. She discovers that someone may be willing to kill to keep the truth about the tragedy a secret. Roach offers a well-paced mystery that deftly moves between past and present as its protagonist navigates a traumatic childhood and the lingering effects of her neighbor’s death. The first part traces the weeks before Alec’s death, with occasional digressions about Sara’s early childhood. These sections deliver insight into Len’s volatile behavior around his wife and children and the effects of homophobia on Alec. The second half of the gripping novel is set in 1999 as Sara returns home and revisits the case. The timeline shift is abrupt but effective as it enables Roach to revisit characters and storylines through a different lens, such as Robbie’s connection to Alec.
A nuanced coming-of-age tale wrapped around a tense, slow-burn mystery.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9780645390414
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.
Murder disrupts the filming of—what else?—The Word Is Murder, based on the first novel starring author Horowitz and his sometime partner, ex-copper Daniel Hawthorne.
With commendably dramatic timing, gofer Izzy Mays bursts into the middle of a pivotal shot on location at The Stade in Hastings to announce that Hawthorne’s been murdered. Of course, what she means (though Horowitz takes his time clarifying this ambiguity) is that David Caine, the rising star playing Hawthorne, has been fatally stabbed in the neck. Suspicion falls on James Aubrey, the agent Caine had just fired; Izzy, because Caine had caused her to be fired, too, though he ended up making his exit first; Ralph Seymour, the washed-up actor who’d returned from New Zealand to play Horowitz opposite Caine, his mortal enemy; and producer Teresa de León, who’s abruptly lost an important source of funding for the project; director Cy Truman; and screenwriter Shanika Harris, because why not? After Hawthorne builds meticulous hypothetical cases against several of these suspects, provoking Teresa’s apt rejoinder, “All those questions in the script and now you’re asking them for real,” he responds to Horowitz’s theory that he may have been the intended target after all by sharing a story from his early days as a private investigator in what ends up looking like the most elaborately extended red herring in the history of detective fiction. The two plots, past and present—or, to be more precise, past and present-day-adaptation-of-a-story-from-the-less-distant-past, are eventually woven together in ways only Horowitz’s most devoted fans will celebrate.
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9780063305748
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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